[RESOLVED] Windows 98 SE - Steer Clear Of It

Ok you freaks, here is the deal. I am a top level tech for one of the hottest selling OEMs. (there is only a few so take your pick)
Windows 98 SE is a great OS, I've been running beta version all year and every one has been more stable than the original 98 can hope to be. Of course this is on MY system, which I custom built and has only the best componets in it (BX6 motherboard/3com 10/100 NIC/ MX300 and Ensoniq sound cards and an Asus 3400TNT/TV).

If i go and try it the low end peice of crap systems that my company builds, then yes I have problems (AMD processors and/or non intel chipset motherboards (VIA/SIS)/ Cough, Copugh Bigfoot harddrives/ COUGH COUGH COUGH Rockwell Riptide modem/sound combo cards (Even Packbell doesnt use combo cards anymore) ATI video)

Conclusion? You get what you pay for. If you buy any major OEM machine at all from a place like CompUSA(HAHA)/Best Bay (HAHAHAH)/Circut City (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) Then you deservce the problems... they are the price you pay for being cheap with your computer!

HEY KEWL SITE! THANKS ALOT MR.DARREN WILSON
YOU ARE DOING A BITCHEN JOB DUDE!
Well with all the neg comments I just thought I'd share a few good one on the w98se
I have been doing P.C.SCIENCES FOR 6 years now I am not a PRO by any means but as good as most out there.I try really hard to intorduce people to this fasst growing field
and get them started on the internet hiways.
ANYWAY I have run 98 a year before it was released,I have run the first release and now the WIN98SE .What amazed me was MY MOM
brought it home and upgraded her system all
on her own!with no prob.nohardboots and no net or hardware failers! MOM HAS ONLY DONE WIN98 FOR 2YEARS!fROM what I've read it seems that the OEM 98SE has more problems than the plain w98se upgrade.
However when I download the IE5.0 it crashed the system,but I believe that
I just had a bad file down load.I have sence
reformatted the HD and am having improved
hookup speeds for the internet.
I have found that w98 likes to play with it's self so I do not leave it running when
not in use.I also found that the task master tune up setting sometimes get cared away so I delete them.AGAIN I WELL SAY I AM NOT A PRO
BUT A HARDING WORK GRUNT.

Possible cure for certain hardware problems:
In bios: APM: disable. ACPI: enable.
PNP OS installed: yes.
Boot to Safe Mode, check for "ghost devices"
under Ctl. Panel/System. If there's two of any one device, delete both. Then reboot. Had multiple "instances" of keyboard, modem,
monitor on Abit BH6 until these were corrected, even after having deleted HKLM/Enum in registry.
Does this occur with other motherboard brands? AOpen, Soyo, Intel, etc.?

everyone can stop bitching now, I have finally sussed all the problems out.

I have now managed to get ICS working on my systems at home with some help from Microsoft ( & they didn't try to charge me either https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif)

I followed a few of the suggestions on the forum to no avail, so I decided to have a fiddle with the DHCP server. Guess what??

Changed a few settings & BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At least now Microsoft realise that this new feature ( bug??? ) is not a s easy to setup as they first thought!!!!!!!

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Who got game???? I know I do!!!!!!!

visit me @ http://www.ace-computers.co.uk

A followup (I posted here a couple of nights ago)

PII 300, PCPartner board 440LX, ATI rage pro 4 meg AGP video card, 128 Mb SDRAM, Sb16 sound card, Quantum Fireball UDMA 2 hard drive (using DMA setting in windows), Conner 1.2 Gb hard drive as slave (5 years old), parallel port external ZIP 100 drive. No NIC cards or networked PC's so I can't comment on Internet Connection Sharing.

I did a format and clean install of Windows98 SE and everything went smooth as silk. It detected all my hardware (I then installed updated drivers after) and everyting is working as before. All my software and games are installed and they all work. (a minor C++ runtime error issue in my encarta 96 world atlas program but hey, thats a pretty old program now and we can't expect every little thing to work properly with some of the new libraries. The program is still usable even as long as I avoid the action that causes the error)

Canon BJC 4100 printer: drivers from Canon's site did not work properly, caused the system to hang mid way through every print job. After removing the printer and then manually removing the 3 mb worth of files (*sigh*) and installing the driver supplied by windows, though, it works great.

Those are the only problems I have had; I wish that it were this easy for everyone.

Grogan

I've installed my Win98SE
it was perfect at all
no error occurs
and The ICS working properly
I download it from Hacker site
the version is 4.10.2222A with 16 digit serial numbers
If there is anyone knows where I can download Win200 Beta3 tell me.....we can share.............Thx

Well gang,
I was a beta tester for the SE version..
You want to talk about bugs!
But as we neered the end with beta 3 it worked fine! In fact, When I got my relese copy I inserted it in the cdrom and it asked me if I wanted to update my system. With lots of fear (I have too much to loose!) I said yes. In 20 min it was finished.. It has been working fine since.. in fact ALL functions are working. Including INET Share.
Now a tip I got from MS from the start of the beta was to create a boot disk with the cdrom drivers on it, Then, fdisk with fat 32 and format the HD with win95.
Insert the OS cd and the boot disk and reboot and go.. Worked great!

i have installed 11 upgrades to windows98
first release to the second release SE , what i did was removed all cards and the drivers except the video card

i made sure that the windows temp. file was cleaned out, i cleaned all internet cache files and internet temp. files. i also cleaned out all cookies. these files for the internet will have a impact on installing IE5
so delete them. also delete your internet connection in my computer.

then i went into the system configuration utility/then startup tab, shut every thing off except the system tray.
re-boot your computer. after rebooting then you can install the upgrade.
from here you should not experiance any problems.

you should do this when ever you upgrade if you want to keep what you have. all this took me two hours total.

of course i was updating win98 first build to the SE build

i have not experiance any problems and i find the SE build to be faster and more stable

on 4 of the upgrades that requested internet sharing i had no problems.

most of the boards were FIC503+ and the asuse p5

GO TO THE WEB SIGHT AND GET THE LATEST DRIVERS TO YOUR CARDS BEFORE UPDATING, IF YOU CAN USE CERTIFIED DRIVERS FOR A START AS YOU SHOULD WITH ANY UPGRADE.

sorry for the typo`s in a hurry!
wayne
[email protected]

Well I had the same problem. I spent weeks reinstalling windows 98 SE and it still didn't work. I had been using different hard disks, different motherboards. I had pulled my computer apart that many times that I felt like going and buying a copy of Win 95. Well you are probably wondering what my point is..........

I finally found the answer. I did have 2 hard disks in my compter. I decided to try removing the secondary hard disk, and it worked fine. I am now running Windows 98 fine.

I have many contacts which can research these problems, and I would be quite happy to help anyone with further problems. (by the way, NONE of these contacts work for that F**KER Bill gates. I HATE MICROSOFT!!!) My Email is [email protected]

Do you know, I tried to get some help from microsoft, and they tried to charge me fifty dollars. Now that is waht I call cheap.

well, good luck in solving further problems with windows

Personally, I don't know what you all are complaining about. I've installed SE on two machines without a glitch and my two co-workers have installed install SE on their machines without a single problem. We all have different hardware and in fact, it installed even smoother than the previous versions of Windows. I'm not a MS fan but they still do build the best OS out on the market. Simply put, Win98SE is Win95 more streamline.

GenX

recently had a customer bring in a Toshiba Tecra 730CDT with Win95b wanting to upgrade to Win98 SE. unfortunately, Toshiba's support site had no procedures for installing 98 SE; only the standard upgrade.

followed Toshiba's instructions. but after the scandisk on installation, got a pop up message saying that Toshiba Windows 95 Utilities is not compatible with SE, and refers to Hardware Section in SETUP.TXT on how to uninstall the utilities. there, MS says to upgrade Tosh Win95 Util to Tosh Win98 Util BEFORE installing SE, NOTHING about uninstalling; Tosh support site says to do this AFTER. i tried both ways with no success. there was no uninstall option in Add/Remove Programs, either.

spent over an hour on the phone with Toshiba Tech Support; they were no help. made back ups of SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT before going any further.

installed a standard Win98 upgrade, no problems. uninstalled that; restored SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT from back up. next, d/l Tosh Win95 Util from website, installed it again (watching what files were placed where) and then combed thru the registry, win.ini, system.ini and removed all keys and references to these files, then deleted these files and directories. rebooted and tried installing SE again. still no luck.

reinstalled Tosh Win95 Utils, and restored SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT from backup, and was ready to call a no-joy. just happened to have the Control Panel open and saw that an icon for Toshiba Utilities which HAD previously been there was now GONE. decided to give it one more try. it FINALLY worked. still don't know exactly what happened. for all intents and purposes, the machine was in the same condition in which it came in.

don't think this is so much a 98 SE problem as it is a Toshiba problem. but there does seem to be some misinformation on MS's part for a message refering one to a file for instructions on how to UNinstall something, only to have instructions to INSTALL something else.

any thoughts or ideas?

Cody

I don't want to come off very rude, but I probably will, sobeit.

I get so sick and tired of so-caled 'techs' that work just once or twice with a particular product, have a bit of a hard time with it and claim it's "****".

For what it's worth, I installed Win98SE Beta's 1-3, as well as the final release all over top of a Win98 install that was having several problems, and not only did everything go smoothly, but by the time I installed the final revision, it fixed every problem that I was having!

That's on an AMD K6-2 300 (oc'd @ 333) on CalGraph Photon 100HC(MVP3C), with 128MB PC100 RAM, AGP Banshee, 10/100 3Com NIC, SB Live! 512, Diamond Ultra SCSI board, Plextor 4x CDW, NEC SCSI 32X CDR, Maxtor 6GB UDMA, W.D. 4GB UDMA.

What's more, I performed a fresh install of Win98SE, final release, on an old clunker Pentium233MMX with 512K Cache, a really really old SB16 ISA board, a 1.6GB HDD, a 2x CDROM, 64MB RAM, some cheasy 4MB PCI vid. card, a 3-year-old 10Mb NIC, *AND* what's more I installed DUN Sharing... EVERYTHING WORKS GREAT!!!

And the icing on the cake: 3 other guys have successfully installed Win98SE without needing to complain! https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif

So, for everyone out there that's whining, especially the one that claimed to be a 'Registered OEM', quit yer bitchin' and get a grip! If you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't have problems with every machine you tried to install it on... maybe a couple, but not the majority!



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Brandon Gresham
Murray, UT

L. Marie, I don't know what you are referring to when you said that "I have found that w98 likes to 'play with itself', so I don't leave the computer on when I am not using it".

First off, we're talking about a computer here, not a 14 year old adolescent! https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif Just kidding.

Seriously, I have been running one version, or another, of Win98 since December of 1997, and my computer has never been turned off... in that mix I have had to replace a system board that died, upgraded the processor, downgraded the processor, upgraded it again, and upgraded it again, upgraded from SIMM's to DIMM's, and then added more, installed 4 different types of video boards, 2 different sound boards, added SCSI and a burner, added a 2nd HDD, changed out the power supply, converted over to PS/2, swapped NIC's once, had two modems installed, then removed both, and probably a whole lot of other crap that I can't remember.

Again, other than while performing these changes, the system has been up 24/7 (oh, but not during lightning storms or power outtages). And so far, I haven't caught my w98 'playing with itself'...

... but maybe that's because it doesn't have an example to learn from... (hint, hint) https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif

Just teasing you...



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Brandon Gresham
Murray, UT

I'll take an Intel computer, powered by Microsoft, any day.
I think most of all the problems are, you upgrade your operating system, but forget to upgrade the parts to make your operating system WORK.
It's like trying to put a Ford part in a Chevrolet.

Good analogy (sp?) -- And I would agree w/your observation...



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Brandon Gresham
Murray, UT